A Plague Tale: Innocence.... first impressions

We are going to enter territory that I rarely have any capability of talking about and that is a game that I actually purchased instead of getting it included as part of my membership.

I didn't pay full price for this game but there was some sort of flash sale and it was so low that I couldn't say no. It may have been something like $5 but I honestly don't remember.

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I only have about an hour and a half logged in this game and so far the game is pretty solid, but it has a very limited range of activities for you to actually do and after about 90 minutes I no longer wanted to play anymore. It was ok though because it was time for bed anyway.

Pro: Superb voice acting

Nothing ruins a story-driven game faster than bad voice acting and I will give APT this much, they put a lot of time into choosing just the right people for the voice acting. The people who are doing the characters are absolutely wonderful even the voice of the little kid who is kind of annoying yet is a central part of the game.

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Normally I am not a fan of children characters in games or movies and a lot of this has to do with the generally very poor voice actors that do the job for them. Huge is still by far the most annoying character in the game, but they did a good job with the casting to minimize the "damage."

Pro: easy controls

Another sure-fire way of chasing me away from a game in record time is to have ultra-complicated controls that if you take so much as a single day off from playing the game you feel as though you need to go through a refresher course just to be able to play it.

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Quite simply put, there isn't much to be done in this game and therefore the controls are very limited and intuitive. They also do a great job of incorporating the tutorial into the story in such a way that it teaches you everything but doesn't take ages to make it happen. I really liked the way they did this and am delighted that the controls are limited and easy to understand as is the menu to see them should you forget.

But this limited number of move and therefore buttons brings me to my next point that was always going to happen in a game like this.

Con: There isn't a wide variety of things to do

With small number of buttons used comes small number of things that you will actually do was made famous by Uncle Ben from the Spiderman film if I remember correctly and for A Plague Tale it becomes evident really early on that you are going to be repeating the same tasks over and over again as the game goes on.

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When sneaking is introduced to us in the first 15 minutes or so. I saw the ubiquitous high grass and thought to myself "oh crap, we are going to be doing a lot of this...i'm sure of it". Unfortunately I was correct in this assessment. You will find yourself over and over standing in the tall grass with Hugo waiting for a guard to do their very predictable square loop while you get in just behind him and then go to another patch of tall grass on the other side. In some situations you will repeat this half a dozen times and if you make a tiny mistake and are spotted you have to start the whole gruelingly slow process over from the start.

The auto checkpoints are frequent and I like how it is done mostly, but I have already encountered a few instances where I didn't see a guard that was around the corner and you are not meant to see him, you are supposed to learn about his presence by not seeing him and when he insta-kills you (you have zero defenses) you have this sigh moment where you contemplate turning the game off.

But I guess I am kind of glad that I did not because things get a lot more interesting once you progress a bit and end up underground.

Pro: Story is great

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Often with "story-driven" games, the story is so overbearing and such a massive part of the game that I am generally turned off by any game that is described as being "story-driven." Not all stories are the same and there is something I truly hate about a lot of games and that is when control is taken away from you for cutscene after cutscene.

Thankfully the story in A Plague Tale is often told while you are moving and participating rather than completely taking control away from you and I truly appreciate this. I think some games really take the cinematics too far and then I don't feel like I am playing a game at all but rather watching a movie that I get to push a button from time-to-time.

The story as I know it so far is quite the mystery in A Plague Tale and I believe that this is probably why the game has such high marks on basically all review sites. While some people will dock it a point or two for the repetitive nature of the game, they will admit that it is worth it because the story is so unique and wonderful.

I have avoided looking at a lot of these because I think that major part of this game that makes it so great is that you are not supposed to know certain things yet and when they do happen it is meant to be one of the most important aspects of the game.

Pro: Loading times are very quick

This will vary depending on what console or PC power-level you are playing the game on, but on the PS5 the loading is so fast that I haven't even really had time to read the little bit of lore or tips that they pop on the screen while it is happening.

This is another deal-breaker for me in games where it is expected you are going to frequently die: If the loading isn't optimized I will exit the game forever quite frequently.

Unfortunately I think this is one of those games that the studio is content with the amount of money that they have made on it already and are not really all that interested in slashing the price in order to get a few thousand extra sales. I got in on some sort of super-special that hasn't been repeated since as far as I know. At the moment this game is around $40 on the few platforms that I have bothered to look it up on (PS5 and PC) and while the game is lovely and has mostly good and very little bad, I still don't think it is worth this much money.

I can't imagine it having much in the way of replay value either and once you know the story and have seen it, this will easily be a one and done sort of game. So if you have a friend that has this game maybe give it a try and borrow it if you are one of the few people out there that still seeks out physical media (seriously, why aren't people doing this?)

I wouldn't pay $40 for really any game honestly, and while this one is good and an anomaly as far as story-driven games are concerned, I wouldn't pay any more than around $15 for a 7-year old game.